Nitish Kumar met with his MLAs before coming to his decision on dumping the BJP for a second time. He met with the Governor late this afternoon to hand in his resignation. “I’ve resigned, and I’ve informed my MLAs about this,” he said to the media after seeing the Governor.

He will meet the Governor a second time with Opposition leader Tejashwi Yadav to seek a new term as Chief Minister. Other parties like the Congress are expected to join the new alliance.

The BJP’s senior leaders from Bihar are flying to Patna to discuss the fallout. They include Sushil Kumar Modi and former Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. “Nitish Kumar has betrayed the people of Bihar and the BJP. People will teach him a lesson,” Bihar BJP chief Sanjay Jaiswal said at a news conference.

The tension between the two parties hit breakpoint over Nitish Kumar’s concerns that Union Minister Amit Shah is working relentlessly to split the Janata Dal (United).

To this end, Nitish Kumar blames RCP Singh, a former leader from his own party, for serving as Amit Shah’s proxy. RCP Singh quit the JDU on the weekend after his party accused him of deep corruption.

In 2021, RCP Singh joined the union cabinet as the representative of Nitish Kumar’s party. The Bihar Chief Minister was upset about being offered only one cabinet position. Yesterday, his closest aide said that RCP Singh had decided to join the centre of his own accord and had informed Nitish Kumar that Amit Shah had said he alone was acceptable as the JDU rep in the cabinet. “Will Amit Shah decide our party’s matters?” said Rajeev Ranjan Singh aka Lalan Singh, who is the president of the JDU.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal or RJD, which is Bihar’s single-largest party, also met today to discuss the Bihar crisis. The party is headed by Tejashwi Yadav. The party is expected to formally announce its support for Nitish Kumar, reviving an earlier alliance with him (the partnership lasted for less than three years). Tejashwi Yadav will, according to sources, serve as Deputy Chief Minister in a new government.

Till 2017, Tejashwi Yadav was a minister along with his brother in Nitish Kumar’s government which had three components: the JDU, Lalu Yadav’s party, and the Congress. Nitish Kumar had formed an alliance with them after calling off a decades-long relationship with the BJP.

But he accused Tejashwi Yadav and his brother of corruption and used that controversy to end his alliance with ‘secular’ parties and returned to the BJP.

Nitish Kumar is reportedly convinced that Amit Shah wants to repeat the Maharashtra model in Bihar – Uddhav Thackeray was forced to quit as Chief Minister after Eknath Shinde, a senior leader from his party, the Shiv Sena, instigated a huge revolt in partnership with the BJP. Eknath Shinde was rewarded by the BJP with the post of Maharashtra Chief Minister.